Dalton Lima

Learning French Duolingo

Today is a very special day for me! I’ve got an achievement from Duolingo, a streak of 100 days, and reached level 23 on the same day! (Levels are caped in 25)

Since last year, I decided to become fluent in French and also improve my written English.

A quick background: I speak native Portuguese from Brazil, so when I started in Duolingo, I chose to study “English-French”. That showed to be a nice strategy, a lot of times I had more English mistakes than French ones (I consider myself fluent in English, but my French was “zero” at the time).

Initially, It was hard to keep a simple week-long streak. So after a while, I made up my mind, put some goals in a spreadsheet, and finish the entire French Tree.

French Tree finished on September 6th, 2017

What now?! Finishing a tree was only the first step in this long journey!
Now I had to keep all tree golden! (Until who knows when…)
My streaks were getting bigger and bigger, I reached 93 days in a row, then I failed. I was a little upset that day (it was a rough day), nonetheless, in the next day I started all over again, from the scratch! So here we are today! - Stronger and bragging about my new achievement! Let’s see if I can make it to 200!

100 days streak - November 18th, 2017

ps.: I am not a superstitious guy, I know that these numbers don’t necessarily mean much. Nevertheless, I learn much about self-discipline in this process, and today my French is awesome. I am already keeping up with spoken French and reading very well. That is what matters most to me! Still, there are lots to learn! Now I am slowly changing to other ways of studying.

Some tips that I can share with you:

Put alarms to remember you (after a while you won’t need it anymore).

Make a schedule (in a spreadsheet) of how many badges crows in a day you will complete, so you can know when you will finish your tree.

Do your studies first thing in the morning. If you can do more, better yet, it’s good to get this out of the way.

Make Duolingo on a computer, with a keyboard, in the mobile isn’t the same experience. Auto-completion hurts your learning. (Disable it on PC)

Geek bonus tip: Learn first how to typewriting accordingly. I recommend TypingClub - 15 days/15 minutes are enough (as a ‘computer-guy’, this was a perfect decision for me, now I am blazing fast in all my other daily activities).